Yngwie Malmsteen has announced Hell Or High Water, his new studio album, due November 13 via Music Theories Recordings / Artone Label Group. The first single, "Now Or Never," is out now.
The song is Malmsteen distilled: palm-muted riffing, baroque counterpoint, a soaring vocal and the kind of dexterity that launched a thousand imitators in the mid-'80s. He handles the lead vocals himself, as he has for most of the past decade, backed by keyboardist Nick Marino, bassist Emilio Martinez and drummer Kevin Klingenschmid.
The nine tracks were written over eight uninterrupted months at home — a working method the Swede first adopted for 2021's Parabellum and has kept since. "When I started making records, I would just take the songs I had lying around," he says. "Later on, I fell into a schedule — make a record, tour the record and then write the next record. Over the pandemic, I realised it was better to focus completely uninterrupted, so I stayed at home to write this album over the course of eight months. I had around 80 or 90 tracks finished, and then I had to decide which ones were the strongest."
Four songs carry vocals; the rest are instrumental. "Am Caprice/Hell Or High Water" is the album's instrumental centrepiece, while "Antikythera" and "Beyond Zeta Reticuli" take their names from scientific discoveries. The record runs exactly 46 minutes — deliberately timed to fit a vinyl LP and, Malmsteen insists, meant to be heard whole rather than sampled a track at a time.
The closing song, "Father," is written for his dad, who died last year. "He was an amazing man," Malmsteen says. "I was proud to have him as a father, and I loved him. I wanted to dedicate all of this to him, and that one particular track is for him. I wanted others to feel what I felt when they hear it. Niccolò Paganini once said, 'One must feel strongly in order to make others feel strongly.'"
"Hell Or High Water" track listing:
- Now Or Never
- Am Caprice/Hell Or High Water
- (He Is) Living A Lie
- Antikythera
- (On The) Battlefield
- Beyond Zeta Reticuli
- Prestissimo In Bm/Adagio
- Eye For An Eye
- Father